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How Can Literacy Be Considered As A Social Practice

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I am going to argue that Literacy itself can be considered as a ‘Social Practice’ (Street: 2001) and I will give my own understanding into my reading experiences which links with the three dimensions: Cultural, Operational and Critical (Green, 2012). After which I will be reviewing my River of Reading (Cliff Hodges, 2010) which I did over two days I was involved in different literacy practices, such as different genres, academic work, books, and packages on different ingredients
Firstly, I am going to consider the question, ‘What does it mean to be literate? ’, there are many answers to this question. UNESCO said ‘A person who can, with understanding, both read and write a short simple sentence on his everyday life’ (DES,1975:10). This shows …show more content…

He says that the autonomous model will have effects on other social and cognitive practices. The autonomous model covers the cultural and ideological aspects and can be presented as though they are neutral and universal (Street, 2000, pp7-8). However, he understands literacy through an ideological way as literacy is a social practice instead of viewing it as a technical and neutral skill (Street 1997). Street says it is about the knowledge, identity and being. Green (2012) also took into account that literacy can be divided into three different aspects of literacy. These are broken down into three dimensions: Cultural, Operational, and Critical. They all relate to different things. Cultural dimensions relate to meaning-making, operational dimensions relate to technical skills and critical dimensions relate to power (Sefton Green et.al. …show more content…

For example, at the beginning of the day when I was reading academic texts on Education for my University work, I had to read them really thoroughly so I was able to not only to understand what the text was about but read through the lines so I knew exactly what was being said and so I had to really focus. However, when it was the afternoon when I was making lunch I looked at food packets and was reading the instructions on how to cook the food on one of the packets and that didn’t require as much concentration but I still needed to understand how to cook it. But, while I was on my phone in the evening, I was looking at social media which didn’t need hardly any concentration as I was skim reading tweets which had been posted on Twitter. Overall, I was amazed with how much reading I did in just 48 hours, from reading labels on food to reading road signs and looking at social

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